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Friday, January 31, 2014

2nd Annual SFR Galaxy Awards: Round Six by Charlee Allden

Most Addictive Characters

Caught in Amber - Cathy Pegau (Carina Press)

In Caught in Amber, Cathy
Pegau takes the drama of the criminal highlife and its ugly underbelly to the
future and a remote earth colony.The
characters that populate this tale are the kind that sticks with you long after
the read is done. From the courageous recovering addict heroine to the
emotionally torn hero to the seductive drug lord, these characters come to life
on the page with a richness that places the novel at the top of my recommended
reading list.

Best New Post-Apocalyptic Series

The Defiance Series - Stephanie Tyler (Carina Press)

The first two books in
the new Defiance series tap into the popularity of motorcycle culture and new
adult heroes and heroines, pushing them into a post-apocalyptic setting. The
series is built around the power struggle happening in the Defiance Motorcycle
Club and the romances that complicate matters in an angsty, wonderful way for
the younger generation, but the books also pull in environmental disaster and
political conspiracy threads that promise a larger world to come.

Most Creative Twist on the Alien
Abduction Trope

Captive (The Survival Race) - K.M
Fawcett (Forever Yours)

Captive starts with the familiar premise that aliens abduct human
women as breeders and from there, takes the road less traveled. The heroine is
not taken to be a mate to an alien, but to breed with another captive human…on
a world were humans are pets. The author fearlessly creates a world where the
climate is unsuited to human life, the aliens are many-times larger than the
humans, and some pets are treasured and pampered while others are forced to
compete in The Survival Race—a deadly sport that few survive.

Best Call Back to Book One in a Long
Running Series

True - Laurann Dohner (Ellora's Cave
Publishing)

This
series is published as paranormal romance, but the central premise of men and
women genetically engineered for use in drug testing at a powerful
pharmaceutical company lands it squarely in SciFi Romance. True is the eleventh book in this popular series and it carries on the tradition of consistent, tightly connected
stories where characters overlap and everything comes back around. The author
goes back to a loose thread from book one to supply the villain in this book.
This series never strays far from the core romance that fans expect, played out
in endless variations from book to book, and it doesn’t strive to be eloquent
or thought provoking, but the tapestry of characters and internally consistent
world is an accomplishment to be much admired.

Best Romantic Subplot in a SciFi Movie

Star Trek into Darkness – J.J.
Abrams, Director

This award should
actually go to both of the new Star Trek movies. As a fan of Star Trek in all
its incarnations, the addition of the Spock-Uhura romance is one of the best
things made possible by the re-boot movies. The author has done a wonderful job
of weaving this relationship into the ensemble without breaking the Kirk-Spock
dynamic.

There are mathematical solutions to the equations of general relativity in which black holes act as bridges to other parts of spacetime, even in principle parts that are otherwise not connected to our own. But I don’t see any reason to suspect that the black holes that actually exist in our Universe behave that way. диамантено шлайфане In particular, if you think about the ways in which actual black holes are supposed to have formed, they don’t seem to lead to anything like this in a natural way.